Speech Centers This Week!

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

I took a little break from speech centers during the holidays so I could indulge in all the fun and festive group activities with my students. Now it's back to work! I don't know how many of you have to complete individual professional development plans (or something along the lines) like my county does, but I decided to focus mine on my articulation kids this year. I wanted to increase the rate of student progress and dismissals (fingers crossed!) by implementing speech centers. It is sometimes difficult to work on each student's needs to the best of my ability when you have a group mixed with kids at different levels. In a perfect world, I'd see all of my students one on one, but like I said, that is a perfect world. Using speech centers I have found that I kind of get that one on one therapy feeling. Hopefully it will be successful. So with all that being said, you can probably expect a weekly post describing my speech centers with ideas, activities, and information about my progress.

If you missed my first post where I explained how I set up my centers, you can check it out here: First Attempt at Speech Centers. Here are the centers I used this week:

Center #1:

Table Talking

This one is a constant center that will never change. I use this center to work on specific goals for each child one on one. I probably won't be describing this center is future posts....

Center #2:

Activity Center

Shout out to Speech Room News with this activity! I used Jenna's multisyllabic words activity paired with a whisper phone. The students simply read each card out loud using the whisper phone.

Center #3:

Listening Center

This week I set up a listening center on our counter. I set up our ancient CD (and cassette) player and a mirror and had the kids practice oral motor exercises with one of the SPEECHercise CD's.

Interruptions during my table talking center has been something I have been trying to avoid. The two biggest things I get interrupted for is 1) "I'm done!" students get through all of the cards or finish the activity before the timer goes off. I now try to remind them before each center starts over, keep going until you hear the timer go off. If you are finished, do it again! and 2) "I don't know what this is?" students come up to me if they do not know what a picture is on a card. This week I told them, if you don't know, guess or just say something you see in the picture. So far, those things have helped! I saw on another teacher's blog that during her centers she wears a crown. When the crown is on, she cannot be interrupted. Sounds good to me, plus who wouldn't want to wear a crown?! :)

I have a tactile center. Students write in shaving cream, salt, use play doh, etc to make their sound, words or sentences with their words. Each student carries a folder with examples of each to the centers with theses with them. I like the idea of the crown and light for "do not disturb me!"